Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.
And one of those ways is to point you toward the calm.
Grandma punched out an armed man one time. He had it coming. He was being an asshole.
One summer back in the days of yore Grandma and Grandpa’s lower field flooded and when the water went back down the creek had relocated itself. In my family’s favor. This meant our family’s cattle had more grazing land and nobody could do much about it.
The neighbors, whose name I can’t remember, took exception to this — sometimes ballistically. So every once in a while my Daddy, then a teenager on the tractor, would only realize he was under fire from the neighbors when a round would ping off the side and nick the paint on the John Deere. Daddy would take cover on the far side of the tractor and basically have to wait a while. Even though Daddy had learned over time to take his rifle with him on the tractor there wasn’t much opportunity or treeline-visibility for him to, you know, lay down suppressive fire enough to get back to the house.
Anyway, one day Mr. Neighbor Rough-as-a-Cob blocked the road with his truck and had words with Grandpa while Grandma and my Uncle Bill, then about three years old, stood by. Mr. Cob decided he didn’t like that (unarmed) Grandpa was not immediately calling the governor and arranging for the Army Corps of Engineers to rectify this creek situation and/or retraining our cows to stay on the right side of an invisible geographical boundary that no longer existed on (a) the ground or (b) in the advanced cognition and GPS-locating powers of cows.
He also didn’t like it that Grandpa was giving him lip and wasn’t intimidated by the shotgun so he cold-cocked Grandpa in the head with the butt of the thing and knocked Grandpa into the ditch.
At which point Grandma — even less intimidated — adjusted Cob’s vertical hold and disarmed him.
Later, Daddy came home from basketball practice and found Grandpa sitting in a chair with his head bleeding, Grandma with bruised knuckles, and the sheriff — annoyed. And Bill had peed his pants.
Grandma and Mr. Rough-Cob each spent a night in jail for that one. Things kinda quieted down after that.
Daddy went back and forth in later years as to what degree all of that was just excessive.
Sure, Mr. Rough-Cob had gotten rough-cob-y. Because Ozarks. Grandpa spun the situation up worse. Grandma at first tried to spin it back down but ultimately decided to regulate. The sheriff spun things WAY down. Bill was (and remains) an agent of chaos.
Bill took after Grandpa. He grew up and at one point got banned by every feed store in the county.
All of this is to say:
(1) We Dales can get a bit snippy.
(2) Grandma Two-Fists was the calming influence in the Dale family. We’re grading on a curve here.
(3) Daddy took after Grandma’s calming temperament.
(4) Me? I took after Grandma, too, but apparently I have flexibility.
Daddy used to say that the future belongs to the calm. The future belongs to the one who is the straight man to the crazy world. To the whole person in a broken world. What he meant — beyond the Sermon on the Mount-ness of it — was that during crises all the chickens and all the extremists and all the chicken-extremists will run around with their heads cut off and set fire to the forest in the name of whatever but pretty quickly most folks will gravitate to the calmest person in the room, the one who refuses to panic, the one who wants to solve the problem and might have a better vision.
In pastoral leadership terms, he’d say the congregation won’t get scared until the pastor looks scared. So never look scared.
A fiction/TV-writing trick I heard along the way: If you want the audience to be worried, show the weakest hero character in danger. If you want them to be terrified, show the strongest character scared.
So Daddy would say Be the calmest person in the room. Be the most stable. Be the quietest at first. Be kind. Be hopeful. Never give up. Make sense. Have a helpful perspective. Have the ingenuity and ideas to get everyone out of the impossible jam. And if you don’t, point people toward who does. And be ready because a crisis could happen at any time. In ministry, somebody’s always dying and someone’s always being born.
Now, I’m a work in progress on this point. I don’t have my facial expressions tuned right on this and perhaps never did. Someone at work told me that I don’t have Resting Bitch Face; he said my resting face (at least at work) has only three settings:
(1) You have got to be fucking kidding me,
(2) I will burn your village and poison your well, and
(3) No.
(Afterward I tried to course-correct my facial facial-ness. Briefly. One friend stopped short in the hallway and said “Oh, shit” and two others thought I’d gotten danger-close to Willie Nelson’s tour bus. Another blurted out “Oh my God, you’ve got cancer, don’t you?” They were concerned. So I returned my face to its default settings.)
Anyway, he told me this after we’d been in a meeting in which a new hire had his ass up on his shoulders and he was trying to get the room to panic over something non-panic-worthy and the bosses couldn’t get him to settle down. So I stood up — perhaps a bit too quickly — and deployed the Full NO and the kid’s cat ears went back and he farted. I then deployed Full Calming Presence to the room and we got the problem solved and nothing burned down.
So: still working on it.
Caveat: sometimes it’s OK to have a bit of both. Sometimes you get a team out of it. James Brown may have been an agent of chaos genius but Bobby and the sound guy were the only ones who could get “Get Up” recorded and out the damn door. (Truth here by Jonathan Bynoe.) And like I said, I have flexibility.
My point is that even though the world is screaming around and even though it may look like the torch-wielders are winning the day they aren’t winning the war. The majority of the world still looks for the calm ones, the kind ones, the ingenious ones. The ones who help. And who sometimes have a plan. And it feels like the majority of the country is finally slowly beginning to turn back toward the calm and the calming. It feels like that worm is finally starting to turn after a few long years.
It’s just a feeling. It’s just an intuition. But my intuition on this sort of thing tends to be good.
So look to the calm and the calming rather than the agents of chaos with the torches. In politics and in pastors and more.
And most comedians are the straight men and women to a crazy world. They stabilize because they remind us that we’ve not been made crazy by a world gone mad. That despite everything we have not become what we have beheld.
Thank God Jon Stewart is coming back to The Daily Show through the election. He’s the ultimate straight man to a crazy world. And he has a world-class You must be kidding me resting face.
Anyway, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for awhile, you now know what I’m trying to do:
Be the calmest person in the room. Be the most stable. Be the quietest at first. Be kind. Be hopeful. Never give up. Make sense. Have a helpful perspective. And have the ingenuity and ideas to get everyone out of the impossible jam. And if you don’t, point people toward who does.
And to forecast well. And to show you how. And get you ready. Because a crisis could happen at any time. And you’re going to be needed.
Welcome to Think Future.
Your gramma is my hero❤️
You clearly inherited your Dad's ability to spin a yarn in the best Ozark fashion...thanks for this. Needed it today.